Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
There’s nothing new about claims that America’s schools are failing. In 1983 A Nation at Risk bemoaned the “rising tide of mediocrity” that had overtaken public education. Risk traced that mediocrity to the 1970s when reformers turned traditional schools, the kind I attended, into “student-centered,” pass-fail, open classroom places, charged with solving “personal, social, and political” problems that had previously been the responsibility of homes and other institutions. Reformers have been adding to those nonacademic burdens ever since. They’ve also been recycling the same theories and methods that first failed five decades ago.
Along the way, these 1970s reforms alternated with brief back-to-basics impulses that culminated in No Child Left Behind. NCLB eventually foundered on its testing obsession and its predictable failure to render every American student “proficient” in reading and math. This inevitable expectations train wreck is why the Common Core has substituted the equally unreasonable but cleverly reworded mandate that schools produce students who are universally “college and career ready.”
No Child Left Behind concentrated power farther away from classrooms and schools. Another NCLB legacy is the notion that the cure for “failing” schools is radical action. This faith in draconian “turnaround strategies” dates back at least to the 1980s, when experts began to throw around words like “restructuring” and “paradigm shift.” NCLB enshrined this ill-conceived strategy in law, requiring that schools with poor assessment results, despite the chronic unreliability of those results, choose among several alleged remedies that include firing the principal and large segments of the staff and turning over control of the school to direct state administration.
There’s no question that incompetence and bad ideas exist among teachers and principals, but removing authority from sometimes incompetent teachers and principals and placing it in the hands of more generally incompetent superintendents and state bureaucrats, who are in addition dangerously insulated from classroom realities, only makes things worse. It can also result in subplots worthy of a Marx Brothers movie. Back in the heyday of restructuring, our state bureaucracy identified a particular high school’s math program as “failing.” The state then hired that school’s math chairman as its traveling math expert in charge of restructuring “failing” math departments.
As for firing a school’s principal, some principals have reached their level of incompetence and are genuinely responsible for problems at their schools. In many cases, though, dismissing the principal is like firing the coach of a losing football team when he’s doing the best he can with what he’s got.
Aha, you say. That’s why we need to fire a lot of his players, meaning the teachers.
I’m not against firing irremediably bad teachers, but the flaw in the coach and team analogy is that teachers aren’t the whole team. Most of the players in a school are the students, and we can’t fire them, even in cases where they daily sabotage other students’ education or pose a physical danger to other children. That lunacy, the insistence that disruptive, dangerous students have a right to occupy space at school while they steal other children’s educations, is one of the chief reasons schools can’t educate their students. Add the common, though not inevitable, consequences of poverty, and the irresponsibility, complacency, and sense of entitlement that pervade American society and infect American students, and you have a recipe for failure that happens at schools but isn’t necessarily the fault of those schools.
A study conducted by researchers at Brown and Berkeley concurs that radical “turnaround” strategies are “more likely to cause upheaval than to help.” The authors charge that assertions of success made on behalf these “school improvement” plans rest on “faulty evidence and unwarranted claims.” Advocates of “turnaround” tactics counter that critics have nothing to offer beyond a “rehash of what failing schools have been trying for years,” that “schools must try bolder strategies” because “children simply cannot wait.”
There’s no question that incompetence and bad ideas exist among teachers and principals, but removing authority from sometimes incompetent teachers and principals and placing it in the hands of more generally incompetent superintendents and state bureaucrats, who are in addition dangerously insulated from classroom realities, only makes things worse.
The last place you want to be is the no man’s land between dueling experts in an education debate. That’s because both extremes have little to offer besides a rehash of unrealistic theories that have failed for decades.
Replacing a staff that knows its students and its community with strangers who don’t, removing the discretion and authority to make decisions from the people who deal with those students every day, and placing it in the hands of distant officials, typically education’s least competent players, who never see those students or set foot in their classrooms, doesn’t offer a likely route to improving students’ academic achievement, especially when the students are the only component that doesn’t change under the new regime.
Our schools do need change. It’s not that the world demands such radically different skills and knowledge from our students. Normal adjustments to curriculum naturally come with the passing of time, but it’s only our rampant narcissism that makes us think the world is such an utterly different place from 50 years ago. It’s also not that teachers are worse than we used to be. We’ve always been good, bad and mediocre, as in any profession.
Ask those teachers, though, how many different student assessments they’ve administered over the past decade, how many different teacher evaluation systems they’ve been subject to, and how frequently those assessments and systems have been introduced and dropped, long before anyone could determine if they were effective. Add to those fads the endlessly recycled education reforms that rise and fall like hemlines, every time guaranteeing to be the panacea. Add to those fashions the battalions of revolving door administrators who introduce pet projects that last until they move on to their next dominion. Add to that revolving administrative door the concentration of power in the hands of the most distant and least competent.
Schools are weaker because education’s leaders have corrupted them.
Students play an even more consequential role in public education. I like my students, and many are conscientious, decent children who I expect will grow up to be conscientious, decent adults. But I don’t have to look back as far as my own 1960s student days to recognize that students have changed. They’ve changed in the 30 years I’ve been teaching. Their parents commonly expect less of them, they expect less of themselves, and I’m permitted to expect less, even as more is expected of me as their teacher.
Until we reckon with those changes in children and in America’s homes, we won’t be able turn around our schools, or anything else.
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